Fang Girl Read online

  “Darling, if I could, I’d already be there. Hakon’s goons are practically crawling up my tailpipe to herd me away from you. I’ve dispatched someone to help you, but he’s a bit of a dark horse—we shouldn’t rely on him being able to keep you safe at your house. So I think our best chance is for you to get on the road, present a moving target. With a bit of luck, we should be able to outrace Hakon and meet up.” Her voice warmed. “I can’t wait to see you again, darling. We’ll be so much safer once we’re reunited.”

  The phone slipped in my sweating palm. Eight different schools had taught me—brutally—how to read the social battlefield. I’d found out the hard way that the girl who wanted most desperately to be your friend … was the girl you could least afford to be friends with.

  And Lily was being very, very friendly.

  On the other hand, at school the popular kids hadn’t also been thousand-year-old evil vampires. “Look, um …” I said. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but you seem to be seriously outgunned. Even if we meet up, I don’t see how you’re going to be able to protect me from some sort of vampire Godfather.”

  “Oh, I’m not,” Lily said, quite cheerfully. “I’m counting on you to protect me.”

  Alarm bells went off in my head so loudly, they drowned out Lily’s glamour. “Say what now?”

  Her laugh echoed from the phone’s speaker. “Ah, my Xanthe. You don’t yet realize how special you are.”

  “Oh no,” I said in dismay. “There isn’t a prophecy, is there?” That never ended well.

  “Darling, I can tell we’re going to get on simply famously.” Amusement still threaded through Lily’s voice. “No. No prophecies, no destinies—nothing shaping the future but our own determination, I promise. But you are unique.”

  “I don’t want to be unique!” I’d always worked so hard to fit in, and now I was going to have to spend eternity as some sort of freak? “I want to be a normal vampire!”

  “But your Bloodline isn’t normal. And we can be grateful that Hakon hasn’t been able to sense that, or you’d already be dead.”

  I froze.

  Not because of anything that Lily had said. Because a patch of shadows and leaves—that I’d spent the past hour convincing myself were only producing the illusion of an evil, lurking assassin—had just moved.

  There was a tall man in black clothing stretched out along a branch outside my window … my open window. He’d overheard every word.

  Lily must have been looking through my eyes. “Hellfire,” she murmured, very softly.

  “Call you later,” I whispered back, barely moving my lips. Then, more loudly, “I dunno, Lily. I don’t like the sound of all of this.” I thumbed the phone off, but kept it pressed against my ear. The man outside didn’t react. “Uh, um, I mean,” I continued somewhat randomly, edging toward my bookcase as I spoke, “I’ve never even met you. I don’t know whether or not you’re telling the truth.” My stalker still didn’t move. He was so utterly still, I would never have seen him if it hadn’t been for that one slight, startled jerk of his head. He stayed motionless as my fingers walked along the line of my books, motionless as I drew one out....

  And then he did move, because my hardcover copy of Breaking Dawn whacked him full in the face, with all my vampiric strength propelling it.

  “HA!” I dived out the window myself as he plummeted. The guy blurred weirdly as he fell, stretching out in a smear of silver—but I had to concentrate on my own landing. I hit the ground hard, rolling to absorb the impact. As I came upright again, I caught a glimpse of something disappearing under the hedge.

  Teleport! I thought frantically as I hurled myself at the wall of leaves.

  Twigs slapped my face; there was a weird dissolving sensation, and my vision went gray for a second. I blinked, and found myself mostly on the other side of the hedge. Tearing my arm loose, I burst clear in a shower of twigs and leaves—and stopped.

  The path behind our house was a narrow strip of beaten earth, bordering a farmer’s field. The short, flat grass stretched out in all directions, barren and empty under the moon. There was no place for so much as a mouse to hide. And there was no sign of anyone.

  With no heartbeat or breath to distract me, I could hear every tiny sound. A car grumbling on the distant main road. The soft swish of the breeze through the grass. And, very close, the rasp of one dry leaf against another as something slunk through the hedgerow.

  I whirled, crouching—and found myself nearly nose to nose with a startled cat. It was a funny-looking beast, somewhat like a Siamese in shape, but with sandy, spotted fur. It blinked at me with innocent blue eyes.

  Uh-huh. Someone seemed to be under the mistaken impression that I was stupid.

  “Got you!” Fast as a snake, I grabbed the cat by the scruff of its neck. It squalled as I hoisted it into the air. “Stop that! I know what you are—werecat!”

  The cat stopped struggling long enough to shoot me a look of pure disbelief.

  “Don’t give me that. I read books, I know a shape-shifter when I see one. And don’t even think that I’m going to fall in love with you.” I shook the cat for emphasis. “Now turn yourself back—”

  Running footsteps interrupted me. I jumped, my grip slipping on the cat’s slick fur; it twisted free and streaked down the path, heading for the street.

  “Crap!” I dashed after it, but my foot slipped in the mud as I tried to turn the corner. Going too fast to control the fall, I sprawled belly-first onto the rough tarmac—straight into a dazzling beam of light.

  “Ack!” Blinking watering eyes, I looked up. The light wasn’t from an oncoming car as I’d feared, but from an ordinary flashlight. The guy behind it gaped at me.

  “Uh.” I pushed myself to my knees, brushing gravel off my palms. I hoped he didn’t notice my teeth. “Hi.”

  He didn’t respond, still staring at me as if I’d hypnotized him. I could hear the harsh catch of his breath, as if he’d been running hard. He couldn’t have been much older than me, although he topped me by nearly a foot. He was wearing jeans and a long leather trench coat, but his short-cropped red hair and combat boots gave him a vaguely military look.

  Also, he was very, very ripped.

  I was suddenly and painfully aware that my hair was a twig-tangled mess, my eyeliner was smeared, and I had cat hair all over my black clothes.

  “Um,” I said, fighting down a blush. At least he couldn’t have recognized me from when I’d been alive. I was certain I’d never seen him before—his shoulders weren’t the sort a girl would forget. “Look, this is going to sound weird, but did you just see a cat go past here?”

  He stared at me for a second longer, then his hand darted into an inside pocket and he flung something at me. Caught off guard, my reflexive recoil was too late—but the impact was so light I could barely feel it.

  Paper clips. Just paper clips, bouncing off my skin to chime against the ground.

  “Hey!” Without even thinking about it, I reached down to gather them up. “What the—”

  But he was already running. The beam of his flashlight bounced as he fled back down the road. Though he was fast for a human, I could have caught up with him without even trying. I could have, if I’d tried. But the glimmer of the paper clips against the tarmac was irresistible, catching like fishhooks in my brain. I couldn’t leave them there.

  By the time I’d picked up the last one, he was long gone.

  Chapter 8

  A cute boy threw paper clips at you and ran away?” Zack said that evening, sitting on the edge of the kitchen counter.

  “Yeah.”

  He contemplated this, legs swinging. “Maybe he likes you.”

  “First, his motivation is not the issue here.” I poured gravy over my cereal bowl of raw ground beef in an attempt to make it feel more like breakfast. “Second, I don’t care whether or not he likes me. Third, at the time I looked like I’d flung myself through a hedge, mainly because I just had. The point is, he threw paper clips at
me, and I couldn’t help picking them all up. I’m a vampire obsessive-compulsive!”

  Zack opened his mouth.

  I pointed my spoon at him. “My sire definitely said ‘vampire,’ so you can forget any word that starts with z.”

  Zack made a face at me and slid off the counter. He wandered over to peer into the fish tank. “Hey, Brains isn’t looking too good.”

  I joined him. The fish looked about as un-good as it was possible for a fish to look without actually being a skeleton. Either vampire blood really was deadly, or Mum had forgotten to dechlorinate the water. I poked at the limp body with the handle of my spoon, and it floated to bob belly-up on the surface of the water. Zack looked as if he might cry. “We could bury it in a nice spot in the garden,” I said, trying to console him.

  “But how will it rise from the dead?” he said anxiously. “It can’t flop out of the grave.”

  In the end we settled for burying the fish at the bottom of the tank, under a mound of neon pink and blue gravel. I went back to my congealing breakfast, trying hard not to think about the fact that there was now either a decaying fish or an undead fish in the kitchen. I wasn’t sure which would be worse.

  “Hey, Janie …” Zack had the speculative tone that guaranteed I wouldn’t like whatever he said next. “Will you take me with you when you run away to join forces with Lily against the evil, bloodsucking vampire Vikings?”

  I groaned, sliding down in my chair. “There are so many things wrong with that, I don’t even know where to start. Zack, I’m not running off anywhere, at least not yet.” Mum and Dad had completely flipped out when I’d wanted to go to a Fang-Girl convention last year. If I snuck out to meet a mysterious, undead woman, I wouldn’t be allowed out of my room until the next millennium.

  “Oh, come on, it would be so awesome!” he wheedled. “I’ve already got the perfect outfit!”

  “Not only no, but hell no.”

  He folded his arms, glaring at me with all the threat a skinny twelve-year-old in a vintage gentleman’s dressing gown could muster. “If you don’t let me be your sidekick, I’ll tell Mum and Dad that you ran out after cute vampire hunters.”

  I showed him my fangs. “Or you could shut up and get to keep your blood in your veins.”

  “Don’t bite your little brother, Xanthe,” Dad said, coming into the kitchen. His hair was damp from the shower, and he wore paint-splattered jeans and a T-shirt. “One vampiric child is quite enough, thanks.” He kissed the top of my head in greeting, then, to my surprise, went to the cupboards and started making himself a bowl of cereal.

  “What’s up with that?” I asked, nodding toward his bowl.

  “Your mother and I agreed that it would be a good idea for me to time-shift to match your schedule,” he said, getting the milk out of the fridge. “She has her teaching commitments, after all, but my publishers don’t care when I paint, as long as I hit the deadlines.”

  “Oh.” Touched as I was by the gesture, this was going to be massively inconvenient. “That’s nice of you, but not really necessary.”

  “Yes, it is,” he said firmly. “Undead or not, you’re still my daughter. And you’re still a minor. Legally, you have to have a responsible, adult guar—uh.” He stared down into the cutlery drawer. “What happened to the spoons?”

  “They’re over there now,” I said, pointing. “I rearranged all the drawers so that the biggest items are near the door, and then they go in descending order clockwise around the room.”

  Dad looked at me. “Baby Jane,” he said, shutting the cutlery drawer carefully. “Are you feeling all right?”

  “No!” I scowled down into my empty bowl. “Everything in this house is out of order!” Even now, the fact that the saucepans were incestuously piled together under the counters was setting my teeth on edge.

  “Hey, Dad,” Zack said, shooting me a triumphant glare. “Want to see something funny?” Without waiting for a response, he grabbed a handful of cornflakes out of the cereal box and cast them onto the floor.

  “Zack!” Even as I yelled, I was already sliding helplessly off my chair to start gathering them up. “I’m going to kill you!” He wisely fled the room, scattering cereal in his wake.

  Dad offered me the dustpan. “Here,” he said, his tone gentle.

  I avoided his eyes, furious and on the edge of tears. “I have to pick them up one at a time.” Despite my best efforts, my voice wobbled. “I can’t help it. And I need everything to be arranged properly, or I feel uncomfortable.”

  Dad was quiet for a moment. Then, “Okay,” he said, joining me on the floor. He started picking up flakes of cereal alongside me, putting them in the dustpan. “You know,” he said after a couple of minutes, “this is completely normal.”

  I sniffed. “No, it’s not.”

  He smiled, crooking a finger at me. I followed him into the living room and watched him hunt around in the stacks of books. “Look,” he said, handing me an academic-looking one. “Right there.”

  I squinted at the paragraph next to his pointing finger. The scholarly language was nearly impossible to decipher, but it seemed to be a chapter on Romanian folklore. Apparently, some legends said that you could get away from a vampire by … “Scattering poppy seeds?” I read out loud.

  “Yep. Because the vampire will have to stop and count them all.” Dad grinned. “Sound familiar?”

  “Not really,” I said doubtfully. “Is this the book with the tortoise thing? Because that was seriously on crack.”

  “This particular belief was quite widespread, even if it doesn’t turn up in movies now. Maybe the real vampires suppressed the knowledge.” He shrugged. “Or maybe it’s simply not that scary. Nobody’s going to want to watch a movie where Professor Van Helsing overcomes Dracula with the astonishing power of baking ingredients.”

  I stared down at the page. Dad was right; I couldn’t think of any popular vampire story that had that in it.

  But the guy last night had known it.

  “So,” Dad said in the fake-casual voice that he used when prying into my personal life, “you didn’t wake us up before dawn. Didn’t your sire call?”

  “Uh …” Hmm. How to break the news. Hey, Dad! I’m a superspecial ubervamp and my sire wants me to run away to be her bodyguard against a thousand-year-old evil vampire with his own personal army! Yeah, that would go down wonderfully. Was there any way of putting this that wouldn’t end up with my parents welding me into a closet for my own safety? “Well …”

  I was saved by the sound of a muffled yell from the back garden, as if someone had discovered that the tree branch he’d grabbed was unexpectedly spiky, followed by a somewhat louder scream, as of someone subsequently losing his grip on said branch, and a very solid-sounding thud, as of aforementioned person hitting the ground.

  I really didn’t like people spying on me. I couldn’t do much about Hakon and Lily, but normal eavesdroppers were another matter. And so, first thing in the evening, I’d spent some quality time in the back garden with the oak tree and a large reel of rusty barbed wire.

  “Explain later!” I yelled to Dad, and zoomed out the back door. Sure enough, a guy had just fallen out of the oak tree. The busted crossbow lying on the ground nearby suggested that he’d had more on his mind than creepy staring. At the sound of the back door, he rolled to his feet, his long leather coat flaring around his broad form.

  “You!” God, did everyone want to stalk me? Were they taking it in shifts? “Okay, hold it right—”

  A shower of paper clips hit me right in the face.

  “You are really starting to piss me off!” I yelled at his retreating back. He never broke stride, disappearing round the side of the house at a dead run. But it was only normal human speed—I could moonwalk faster than that. My hands blurred as I grabbed paper clips as fast as I could. “You aren’t getting away that easily!”

  “Xanthe?” Mum’s head appeared in her bedroom window. “What’s—?”

  “Stay inside!” My an
ger and frustration felt like a storm cloud pressing against the inside of my skull. Shoving the last few paper clips into my pocket, I sprinted round the house and down the driveway like a dog after a rabbit. I burst out onto the road—just in time to hear the roar of an engine and see an enormous white van barreling toward me. Only vampiric reflexes saved me; without thinking, I leaped straight upward. I caught a brief glimpse of my nemesis’s startled face through the glass, before the arc of my leap took me up onto the roof of the van itself.

  I promptly discovered that keeping your balance on top of a moving vehicle was a lot more difficult than the movies made it out to be, and fell off. The van fishtailed around the corner with a smell of burning rubber.

  “Oh, no you don’t.” I put my head down, and ran. Fire flooded through my veins, spiraling out from my heart until every fiber of my flesh felt incandescent with strength. My shoes were smoking, but I didn’t care if my feet wore down to the ankles. We were still in the quiet Lancing backstreets with speed bumps stopping him from accelerating too fast. And there was no one to see me—

  Someone darted into my path, far too late for me to do anything about it. I went sprawling, rolling head over heels a good ten feet along the road before I managed to stop myself. I staggered back to my feet to see the van’s mocking red taillights disappear into the distance, joining the main road.

  “Damn it!” My scrapes and bruises were already fading back into my skin, but my head still felt like someone was pulling at my brain. Furious, I spun round to see who had tripped me up.

  “Don’t move,” growled the very large man carrying a gun and a stake.

  “Uh …” The weird tension in my head had intensified to a distracting white-noise buzz, and the skin between my shoulder blades crawled. I risked a quick glance back, and found that another man had stepped out from behind a Range Rover to block my escape route. From the enormous pistol in his fist, I didn’t think he was out for a nice evening stroll. I was guessing I’d run straight into a trap.